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This 1939 acetate disc of Ezra Pound’s full recording bears a handwritten annotation that reads “’Altaforte’ not to be played” and scratch marks to prevent the poem from being played accidentally.Photograph by Christina Davis

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News

Business Curriculum Changes

1.25.11

Harvard Business
School dean Nitin Nohria and senior associate dean and chair of the M.B.A.
program Youngme E. Moon have signaled two changes in the two-year M.B.A.
curriculum, both effective this coming fall. The changes, voted upon by the
faculty on January 19, were announced over the weekend both to students now
enrolled and to applicants accepted for admission in the 2011-2012 academic
year, who may be choosing among business programs in which to enroll.

The first-year “required
curriculum”—a sequence of common foundational courses in management, taken by
all students (covering finance, financial reporting and control, marketing,
technology and operations, business and government, strategy, ethics, etc.)—will
be supplemented with an additional offering, the Field Immersion Experiences
for Leadership Development (FIELD). It is likely to be organized as three
small-group modules, one each at the beginning of each semester and a required
unit during the January term. As now conceived, the modules will cover
leadership, globalization, and integrating students’ first-year learning. The
middle unit is to be a global immersion experience, at a company outside the
United States, to which the group would travel together, there to work on a
common assignment. Overall, the FIELD course aims at a hands-on “doing”
approach to learning, rather than classroom-based “knowing” management material
and skills. The course is being described as “experiential, immersive, and
field-based.”

In addition, the second-year "elective curriculum" will be altered by “modularizing” the
calendar: breaking each semester into two quarters, and introducing longer
scheduled learning times every other week, so the regular diet of case-based
classes can be supplemented by longer exercises, simulations, or other
approaches to the course material. At present, a course consists of 20 to 30
class sessions, each of 80 minutes. The new schedule will consist of four half-terms,
each with 14 sessions, some extending to 120 minutes; and it will accommodate
class-based learning followed by field-based courses, among other options.

As such, both
changes represent at least initial evolution beyond the school’s famous
case-method class format.

Some of the
background work for these changes began during HBS’s centennial year, in 2008,
when then-dean Jay Light asked Dickinson professor of accounting Srikant M.
Datar and Christensen professor of business administration David A. Garvin to
examine business education. Their book, Rethinking the MBA, published last year, cites a concern that some of HBS’s cases have devolved
into “problem sets, narrowly designed to teach technical skills” rather than
place those skills in a “broader company and industry context,” and recommends
changes like those being introduced into the curriculum now. (For Garvin’s
analysis of case-method education, see his 2003 Harvard Magazine feature.) Dean Nohria, who took office last July 1, apparently accelerated development of the new course
and restructuring of the elective program. (Read more on Nohria’s views of
management education here.)

Although
many details about how both changes will be implemented have yet to be worked
out, the school felt it was imperative to communicate them now so that
prospective matriculants could choose appropriately among programs they are
considering. HBS’s changes, which may be only the first indication of more
sweeping curricular and teaching revisions, come in a context of much
rethinking of business education, with significant changes in the course
offerings of Penn’s Wharton School and business schools at Stanford and Yale,
among others.

The
changes have elicited interest in the business press, as reflected in online
reports by Bloomberg Businessweek’sLouis Lavelle and Fortune’sJohn A. Byrne.